berryhill, let me commend you for your service. let me knowledge that there is no one who's been working harder to make sure that we have a permanent chair at the secretary of the social security then the chairman himself and we have supported him in those efforts and hope the administration will act soon but i want to thank you for your service. i think there's unanimity on the committee with respect to authentication . how would you go about implementing that and what is the cost of that? >> certainly any ideas, i think there's great ideas on this panel today. we will take all of them and review them and opt them out so it's certainly not something i can address today. lots of ideas are good and you have to look at the price tag attached to them. we will circle back and take a look at the ideas that the committee will would like us to look at. >> any idea on that price, mr. grobman? >> one thing we need to realize when we look at the price is the price of not taking action. if you look at the cost related to fraud or misuse of so

my question is for miss berryhill but listening to mr. johnson's story earlier i'm reminded of a song called secret agent man, giving you a number and taking away your name. that's a concern obviously. but i want to ask you about getting a new social security. when you lose your credit card or it gets stolen, i'll tell you what, that bank wants to get you a new one right away. one because they want you to use it again. and two they want to make sure that no more money comes out of their account. because it personayffts them as well. and i don't see the same for the social security administration in that environment. because if you think about it, when someone's social security is taken the fraud is either at the bank or through the irs, taxpayer, maybe if someone is getting your social security check, it may affect you, i don't know. i'm kind of asking about that. but why do we make it so difficult to get a new number when that really is the problem? because i don't know that there is the same amount of concern on the social security admi

seated at the table or nancy berryhill for acting commissioner of the social security administration, elizabeth curda, director of education workforce and income security for government accountability office, samuel lester can privacy counsel electronic privacy information center, paul rosenzweig -- >> it's rosenzweig. >> thank you. senior fellow at the art history institute, the senior vice president and chief technology officer mcafee, jeremy grant, coordinator, james louis senior vice president technology policy program center for strategic and international studies. acting commissioner berryhill, please begin your testimony. >> chairman johnson, ranking member larson and members of the subcommittee, thank you for inviting me to identify identity theft and the future of the social security number. i'm the social security acting commissioner. the scope of our program is enormous. we pay monthly benefits to over 62 million social security beneficiaries and 8 million supplemental security recipien recipients. during 2017 repeat of 934 billion social security beneficiaries and 55 billi

witnesses include social security administration acting commissioner, nancy berryhill, mcafee chief technology officer and the counsel for the electronic privacy information center. they talk about recommendations regarding data privacy laws, identity authentication, social security number modernization and identity theft protection for this is just under 90 minutes.